She didn’t know the half of his treachery, I’m sure, and I probably don’t either. Still, something pulls me along, beckons me forward. I step uneasily up the stairs after him.
“What’s . . . ?” I’m tired of asking questions that don’t get answered. I let that one die half formed, and all I hear is our feet creaking up the stairwell and the occasional groans and clicks of the house settling. We pass the second- and third-floor landings, pause briefly on the fourth, and then scale a ladder up onto the roof.
It’s raining in the Underworld. A cruel wind has whipped up around us, and it buffets my body; I have to concentrate not to swoop away off the roof with it. Sarco is exultant—he throws his arms up to the storm and laughs. “Can you feel it, Carlos?”
It’s a rhetorical question, apparently, because he just keeps laughing instead of waiting for an answer. I can, though. The air is pregnant with tension the way it gets just before a hurricane. “The missing piece!” Sarco yells into the sky.
I just wait. Obviously, asking questions is useless. The guy will explain or he won’t, and if he don’t, I’m out. Matter-of-fact: I take a step back toward the ladder.
“You can have whatever you want, Carlos!” Sarco says. He’s suddenly very close to me, horribly close. “It’s you. I thought it was Trevor. Sasha maybe. But it’s you. The missing piece.”
“The fuck you going on about?”
By way of an answer, Sarco puts his hand on my head again and I see me, thrashing an arm at someone, my eyes desperate. I swing again, take a hit across the face, and stumble backward. Blood pours from a gash on my forehead. I launch forward, mouth open, and disappear.
“They don’t need you, Carlos. They use you happily. But they don’t need you.” The dead sky rages around us with the coming storm, but Sarco’s voice has dropped to a rancid whisper. “They don’t even really know what you are, your true power.” I know he’s talking about the Council, and I’d be more comfortable if I didn’t partially agree with him. “You’re much more than some wretched intermediary. You’re more than alive and more than dead, not just a poorly constructed halfling. You are complete.”
I look around. The building is real beneath my feet. Mama Esther is somewhere inside, in the living world, maybe sleeping, maybe drugged. Ngks are crawling through the ghostly buildings around us. Out in the misty Underworld, I see the hordes of hungry, dilapidated souls that met us at the entrance. They’re swarming toward us; there’s no mistaking it. It’s a sclerotic, gradual swarm, but it’s definitely headed our way. I think about the list of ingredients, as Mama Esther called it, and look back at Sarco. “You’re building an entrada.”
“Fuck an entrada! I’m tearing a hole in the very fabric of the life-death continuum! Don’t you see, Carlos?” He’s almost pleading now, and it’s damn awkward. But, suddenly, I do see, all too clearly. Ghostly threads stretch from the dilapidated buildings nearby. They’re wispy and barely there but pulsing with energy. They all join together at a point in the center of the rooftop.
“The living and the dead don’t have to be so far apart. You are the living embodiment of that truth. It’s a farce, this barrier, this wall between us. It’s a lie.” Lightning crackles across the sky. Black rain drizzles in wild circles around us.
“The cursed monk,” I say.
Sarco nods. “You followed Trevor’s paper trail.”
“The stranger on the road. That was you, all those hundreds of years ago?”
“Hm, one familiar to me—let’s say a distant uncle. The Towermaster introduced us. Masenfel, plague-bringer. A sorcerer of almost godlike powers. Taught me many things, that old one.” He looks lost in thought for a few seconds and then turns his empty face to me. “What do you want to know?”
“Why?”
“Why destroy the barrier between the living and the dead? You know that already, Carlos. You may not understand the depth of it, but inside yourself, you know it’s the natural way. Civilization took a turn, tore us from one another. There was a time, long forgotten, never recorded, when ancestors walked freely among the living; there was harmony. Carlos, the living world becomes more powerful for this. Do you see that?
“I destroyed the Towermaster because he wanted to hoard all his necromancy and world-shifting arts to himself and his select few. All these mystical arts don’t need